Hypothesis re origin of circumcision

Sun, Jul 21, 3:12 PM (2 days ago)

James,

A mere hypothesis:

Preface.

It occurred to me while reading a post by Heartiste on Gab about broken bones.

CH on GAB wrote: “I have a simple test which tells me when I've deviated from healthy eating. If I've been eating a lot of crap, my joints will ache... When I eat well—low carb, good fats, lean protein, no supermarket middle aisle frankenfoods—my joints are lubed....”

Then someone commented in agreement, stating that more sugar and refined carbs means achier joints.

My initial thoughts were that I could confirm this. I felt something like this and with great correlation when I was recovering from multiple fractures in a wrist/forearm. It was as if when I recently had sugar, then my blood became thicker and sludgier and I could feel it clogging up in the veins near the joints and bones that were trying to recover and rebuild. Like my body was telling me, ‘hey we’re gonna need the high octane no crap stuff running through here while we work, alright buddy?’

Then I thought: Perhaps everybody should have some of their bones broken so they can get this high intensity reminder of the body blood bone nutrition connection. Because I still have a bit of this with my forearm wrist. Like some people can anticipate the weather from maybe barometric sensitivity in their knee socket or whatever.

Now the hypothesis:

Maybe this was what circumcission arose from? Maybe originally it was a consciousness raising ritual meant to be done to a man or young man entering adolescence so as to deeply embed in him some lesson regarding the penis? Maybe the connection between putting one’s penis in a bad nasty dirty spot —thinking STD’s in modern parlance, and pain? Or masturbation or sodomy?

I’m thinking the originals knew it was a trade off in sensation or whatever. Like one guy sitting around the fire was like, yeah, I used to have that problem until the accident and now, I don’t know, I just can’t do it anymore. The tip of my penis hurts just thinking about it. Then some of the other guys were like, “F it, I believe Oger, let’s do it!” I dare you, etc. etc. (I’m imagining they’d discovered alcohol and maybe other drugs by this time, too.) Then afterwards it was partly a sunk costs situation. Like, ‘no, no, this is really good for you, for us as a community.’

But essential my hypothesis here is that maybe the consciousness of that painful experience brought about such a certain type of risk avoidance or something avoidance thing that it was considered, with good reason, worth it?

Then of course it turned into a baby thing because too many boys chickened out or said ‘F that’ and ran away or whatever?

This hypothesis is strictly limited to the initial, starting point or early inflection point of the ritual. Once it hit a certain percentage or certain resonance in a community, I would guess other aspects like ‘rite of passage’ or ‘group identifier’ might kick in and act like multipliers or amplifiers within the group. But I’m assuming maybe there was something practically or materially useful to the initial rise of the practice —something useful to the recipient/victim in a sense similar to the mind-body thing that can arise from frequent working out or martial competition or injury. In other words, with this hypothesis I’m assuming a naturalistic origin —if I’m reading my five minutes of comparative research correctly. And since it had to hurt I’m assuming maybe there was a benefit to the hurt in and of itself. And thinking of my formerly broken wrist which still provides this sort of blood sugar monitoring consciousness app, I’m wondering if ancient circumcision did that: fried some useful, probably sexual, consciousness into the victim/recipient/protege/acolyte.

Just an hypothesis.

What do you think?

—Snake Splitskin

Ps I checked some of the links on your recently posted History of Circumcision link, but didn’t see this theory.

I like it, Snake.

Based on the twitter thread below one can see that much political muscle is expended to this day to harvest foreskins from people for whom circumcision is not a religious practice.

circumcision thread

Mon, Jul 22, 5:41 PM (18 hours ago)

As for the origins of this deviant practice, which I was subjected to as an infant and which has caused me much pain and irritation through my life, I have long favored Joseph Campbell's theory that circumcision of the penis at puberty arose among primitives as a means of making the entry into manhood mimic the girl's fist menstruation.

However, after discovering that the Lie of medically necessary circumcision in America was introduced in 1865, just as the Great Foundational Lie that only African Americans had ever been enslaved began to be developed as a national narrative and was then pushed aggressively beginning in 1945, just as another false narrative [that of American national Innocence] was begun, it has occurred to me that mass, unnecessary surgery might have sinister undertones. This suspicion is buoyed by the fact that 2015—the year American reality was reversed in the media consciousness—saw the beginning of the current craze to surgically alter human children of both sexes to fit the perverse shape of neurotic parental delusions which happen to be shared predominantly by people calling for the end of private gun ownership and for the demonization and criminalization of masculinity.

Circumcision is a kind of branding, a maiming mark of the Dark Shepherd upon his bleating flock. In reading the story of SAS stud Andy McNab and his team being captured in 1991 Iraq and their great fear that they would be mistaken for Chosen Folk by their Islamic captors based on their circumcised state, it became obvious that the process is a tribal brand of sorts.

Interestingly the maimed penis has been promoted as "normal" and "desirable" primarily through pornography and through pseudo-medical lies. I was told that most uncircumcised penises rotted off from disease as a boy. Most African American men I have known have caved to pressure from their women to have their sons' penis maimed by the women stating that no woman will want a natural penis.

I suspect that circumcision among boys and men arose in primitive societies due to various causes. However, I suspect that the form in which it has come down to us has its roots in livestock management and that it is no accident that the great and pervasive faith which first labeled God as a shepherd and mankind as sheep adopted circumcision—not as Campbell suggests as a metaphoric rite intended to be a brotherly reflection of the transformation of child to woman, but as a portal into manhood intended to render the adolescent human docile within his folk just as the potential ram is rendered impotent by castration and docile within his fold.

I see circumcision as an outward ritual consecrating the youth's metaphysic castration before God and his induction into social slavery.

Then again, in modern practice, it has probably been nothing but a butcher's grift, a way of filling medical pockets.

As I science fiction writer it would be a cool way of preventing postmodern men from using time travel to escape the current sissy matrix to the heroic times of Medieval Christendom out of fear of being consigned to baking and banking by some cruel Norman lord.